Recent Posts on Relationships

Popular media fuel stereotypes about mental illness and dangerousness, because that is how they generally are portrayed on the screen. Our fear of mentally ill people also stems from our own inability to communicate with them and our lack of knowledge about mental illness. Learn how to better communicate with people who may have a mental illness.

Social relationships, by their very nature, are transactional. They are richly imbued with nuance, color and tone. Relationships engaged in the various theaters of social media lack these characteristics because social media introduces two parallel and paradoxical elements - false intimacy and social distance.&nbsp;

Why are your "talks" about difficult and painful topics still unsatisfying and unproductive even after you take time to "calm down?" How can you shift these communications from fault finding and defensiveness to listening and being heard? How do you finally move from Destructive to Constructive conversations?

The "Messin' with Sasquatch" ads for Jack Link's beef jerky were always irritating and pointless, but with this new wave of tragic teen suicide prompted by being bullied to death, these ads are offensive. They are clearly saying it's not only fun to be cruel to someone different, but it's so acceptable that we are going to use the concept to sell our product.

&nbsp;Differentiation is hard. One of the benefits of a good enough marriage or any other deep partnership is that it provides a holding place in which each partner can “become more truly oneself.” Differentiation is not easy to describe. Many couples tell me, “It sounds nice, but I don’t get what it’s supposed to feel like.”&nbsp;

GPS tracking our kids can harm them. But monitoring our children closely can help them. The two are not the same thing. Children who are well monitored are likely to engage better at school, which means they'll get into far less trouble and stay in school longer. It doesn't mean, though, that they'll get higher grades.

You've tried to make your relationship with a borderline or narcissistic person work. But it's become clear to you that leaving is your only choice. Following is the second half of my article on why breaking up is so hard to do, and how you can make it easier on yourself.

The Chilean rescue scenes on TV seemed to feature a lot of spousal embraces and romantic love stories. Looking to see whether the miners were overwhelmingly married, I discovered something else: The ones who were married were rescued sooner than the single ones.&nbsp;

In what claims to be the first study of its kind, Christopher Sibona, a doctoral student in the Computer Science and Information Systems program at the University of Denver looked at the reasons why people get unfriended on Facebook.

Dear Irene,I'm 22, and my best friend Allie and I have been friends for 11 years. We went to middle and high school together, and stayed incredibly close despite four years at different colleges in different cities, and a year in different countries. We have traveled many times together, and decided last year that in October 2010 (post college graduation), we would go on a year-long trip together, working on different farms throughout the United States. I thought our friendship was incredibly resilient, but now I'm not so sure.&nbsp;

Four studies show that a biographical sketch with the exact same information (except for relationship status) is rated more negatively when the person profiled in the sketch is said to be single instead of coupled. However, the actual differences between single and coupled people are few and far between.

If you have been trying for months (or years) to get pregnant, the news of anyone you know having achieved this triumph can be a real bummer.&nbsp; But when the news comes that your best friend is the mother-to-be, there are lots of emotional issues for both of you.&nbsp; Was hers a planned pregnancy?&nbsp; Did you hear the news from her directly?&nbsp; How open have you been with her about your struggles with infertility?&nbsp; Is she sensitive to your emotions upon hearing her news?&nbsp;

I got an email the other day from a woman who writes about her frustration that her teenaged daughter wants to spend Thanksgiving with her father rather than her. The mom went on to say, "Why, when it was HIM who betrayed me and broke up the family, is she so defensive of him, and I'm cast as the bad person trying to keep them apart?"&nbsp;